ABSTRACT
Poets set them side by side, in collocation; compare them, in simile, a dream is like a law-court, a law-court is like a dream; or fuse them wholly in metaphor, law-court is dream, dream law-court. Poetic figures, which are figures of speech and figures of thought, are not fortuitous. Equally, a metaphor or simile or even a simple collocation of two things in a poem is not something finished and completed, like the answer to a sum or the conclusion of a train of logical reasoning. Thus public and private mind, forms juridical and forms psychological, are suggested as mutual interpretations of one another, by poets who in their turn have many times been called dreamers and who, one of their numbers claimed, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. If law-courts are partly dream, then people dreams may also be partly law-courts where they pass judgements on theirselves.
